Tear Jerker / Pluto

• The death of Robbie the police robot, complete with Gesicht visiting his wife. This is only Chapter 1.
  • Robbie's wife is an older model so she doesn't look human and thus can't emote. She even mentions that she has a hard time relating to human experiences, like the pleasure of drinking tea. Then she talks about how she works as a maid for a family. Before their son was born, they'd adopted a dog, and the two were raised like siblings. When the dog passed away, the boy cried everyday and Robbie's wife spent a lot of time comforting him. For all her troubles with imitating humans...
    "I think that now, I finally understand... how he felt..."
  • When Gesicht goes to salvage Robbie's memory chip to give to his wife, the attendant carting off his remains flippantly tells Gesicht to take whatever he wants from the "junk". Knowing Gesicht's backstory beforehand makes this moment even worse, especially as Gesicht can't remember.
• The death of Mont Blanc is not only saddening on its own, it's also pretty gruesome and gory; mind also that it's still only Chapter 1 and we're talking about a robot as well. The homages of the Swiss people are also tremendously heart wrenching.
  • Despite being the first to be killed off, he's mentioned repeatedly throughout the story, and while the readers never personally get to know him, the effect of his death is quite clear. Thousands of people worldwide gather to mourn and commemorate him. Construction workers wanted to dedicate a monument to him, free of charge, but ultimately decided against it because Mont Blanc hadn't wanted to disrupt the Alpine scenery. Pictures are shown of him rescuing people and playing with children. Brando keeps a framed photo of himself and Mont Blanc, saying that even though they met during the war, he remembers his comrade for the time they spent hanging out together rather than fighting.
• The main character's "child" getting cruelly and pointlessly killed by some fanatic.
• A flashback in Act 35, juxtaposing the two families of two robotic children killed by the same guy who also killed Gesicht's child. The human family showed grief and pain emotionally and visibly. The robotic family... They had no visible emotions, but it's like the Simpsons' quote, "Why was I programmed to feel pain?", played horribly, heartbreakingly straight.
• Chapter 6 is like this too. "Don't sing out there. Come back to me. It's time to practice your piano."
  • To elaborate, the composer is quite nasty to North No.2, saying that anything a machine makes is fake and therefore isn't music. Despite that, North No.2 persists in learning how to play the piano, even going so far as visiting the composer's hometown in Bohemia to learn folk music. All because he wants to be more than just a war machine. And then, not long after the composer finally warms up to him and starts teaching him, North No.2 has to return to the battlefield to face Pluto. As he plummets from the sky as a fiery comet, singing as he dies, the composer says the above line.
  • The composer lashes out at North No.2 out of bitterness towards his mother's abandonment of him and his childhood struggles with a terminal illness. After returning from Bohemia, North No.2 informs him that his mother hadn't abandoned him but rather left to find money for his treatment. That was the only way for her to pay for the doctor who would save his life. She was with him as he started to lose his eyesight, but at seeing his resentment of her, she never reached out. The composer finally remembers how his mother would smile and sing with him, a memory he blocked out in his resentment, and breaks down in tears.
    • North No.2 asks the composer not to refer to his recurring dreams, which replayed his memory of what he thought was his mother abandoning him, as nightmares. "They are dreams, not nightmares, because they are nothing like mine."
• Atom's first appearance at the end of the first volume. He just looks so... child-like.
• Chapter 24. The robot dog. The little robot dog trying to stand up and play as it's dying. Hackneyed or not, damn you Urasawa!
  • The efforts of Prof. Ochanomizu to try to repair it are also really sad. Ochanomizu fails to repair it and it dies, prompting the professor to shed tears for its death.
    • On top of his reaction to the Dog's death there's also there's also him setting up Goji to be captured for purposefully using the Robot Dog to get to him and killing his guard despite already being welcomed in. He plays it cool with Goji until the guards circle the perimeter and makes it clear how personal he took the unnecessary murder of two robots just to try and lure Atom out.
    "Ah, about time they arrived... the Police I mean, you killed Yujiro out there, didn't you?"
• In Chapters 33 and 34, Hercules recalls seeing a shell-shocked robot after a battle, desperately trying to wash his hands under a broken water pipe, saying "It just won't come out."
• Sahad. He was a gentle robot that only wanted to fill his homeland with flowers, but he's now being used by what he believes is his own father as a tool of vengeance and hatred.
• Chapter 46. Gesicht is utterly heart-broken when he sees Ali who then points a cluster cannon at him.
• Chapter 47, especially the ending. "Excellent. It can be for pretend, first... The pretense will turn real with time. You will learn to truly cry, as I do."
• The last few pages of chapter 54. Epsilon throwing his arms away to protect Wassily now defenceless against Pluto. Then wondering where "myself" is killed, then the guard robot saluting such a brave robot. Then stuff goes From Bad to Worse.
• "We're keeping you with us 'til the end of the world."
• Brando's death. Even worse is that he's patched in with Atom, Gesicht and Hercules at the time, so they all get to listen to him die. What even makes this worse is the fact that Brando's attempt to give the group footage of what they're all dealing with is rendered pointless as Brando's life flashes before his eyes, mainly images of his family who he won't be returning to.
  • During his introduction, Brando tells Gesicht that winning a fight is up to luck. However, whereas most people believe in leaving things up to chance, Brando believes that luck is something one takes for oneself. As such, he's a lucky man. When he's transmitting his memories of his family, one of the last things he says to Gesicht is: "Didn't I tell you? I'm a lucky man."
• Dr. Hoffman and Helena mourning Gesicht's death. Especially sad, since it didn't have as much in-universe coverage as the deaths of Brando, Hercules and Epsilon. Helena's crying is specially painful as it's the first time she's cried ever, since she's a robot like her late husband.
• Pluto's final sacrifice to destroy Bora and his farewell to Uran... Sniff...
• Atom's anguished fury: (paraphrased) "Brando didn't want to die!" "Epsilon didn't want to die!" "GESICHT DIDN'T WANT TO DIE!"
• For fans of the source material everything's even worse because of there's just so much inevitability about the whole thing. You know what's going to happen and there's nothing that you can do. That's how the story always went and that's how the story will always go. It pulls no punches and nobody is Spared by the Adaptation. Epsilon dies, Gesicht dies, everybody who dies in the original story dies.